1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to semantic stenography including automatically converting short notes to semantically-coherent grammatical text.
2. Description of Related Art
Students, professionals, pollsters, and employees of call centers or customer service centers often do not have enough time to write down complete, well-formed sentences to describe information communicated orally to them. Instead, it is common for such individuals to jot down a few key words or short notes that convey the essential facts as the conversation, lecture or other oral interaction progresses. Stenography is the art or process of taking short hand during an oral communication and later converting the short hand notes into a full written text or transcript of the oral communication.
It is often desirable to speed up the process of converting short hand into full written text, so that the oral communication can be recorded or published quickly. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0089470 A1 discloses a real time internet transcript presentation system, which produces a real-time transcript of a live presentation. However, converting oral communication into a transcript often does not result in well-formed sentences. In addition, these real-time transcription systems only provide raw information. These real-time transcription systems do not summarize information in condensed, semantically-coherent grammatical text or well-formed sentences to quickly and efficiently communicate information to an audience or community.
In addition, being able to generate the notes in the first instance depends on conventions that associate complex conceptual constructions with what could be called “semantic abbreviations.” These conventions are often shared by communities. The tighter the community and the more frequent the need to communicate recurring types of information, the more efficient such coding becomes.